The magazines are stacked in my den, stacked in my living room, stacked in my office. Some, still, are pushed under the back seats of my cars, those magazines that never made it from mailbox to the inside stacks. These aren’t just fly fishing magazines. Those are there, of course, the ones that I’ve written for and the ones that I haven’t, but it’s not only sporting magazines. It’s the Atlantic and the New Yorker, it’s home magazines like Dwell and Veranda. It’s any magazine that I thought I might like, because the regular price was $99 but my Preferred Saver’s Rate was just $10.99. $18.99 for two years. And so I fill out the card and the magazines come and then I stack them so that I might read them sometime. I rarely do, but at one point I did, and so now I accumulate for that time the feeling returns.
I bought a white boat with an outboard engine that was never able to shake its drinking and smoking habits. It was a fine boat, it is a fine boat, and for those first few summers I spent so much time on that boat. I would take my son out and we’d fish together, to this day his eyes never shining brighter than when his rod is bent over with a fish tugging at the other end of the line. My daughter and I would go for rides, and she’d hang from the side of the t-top and sign along to the radio, the setting sun reflecting softly off of her smiling face. What a great boat that was, and what great times those were. The boat didn’t make it out of my driveway this year, because my schedule has been too busy, my interests elsewhere. Though today I am filled with regret after thinking of how my children loved those days.
I traded the boat interest for a fly fishing interest, and spent more time wading up skinny Wisconsin creeks than captaining that center console. I fished and I fished, bragging about the catch, the size and the quantity, reliving the way a trout makes you feel when it sips a seam-riding Caddis. This is the hobby that led me to buy land, to build new, to attempt to find a place that would be solely mine. Not somewhere I have to share with work, somewhere I can live uninterrupted by the less important things. This summer, I didn’t fly fish very much. I wanted to, but I didn’t. And when I did, my heart wasn’t in it.
My interests tend to run in this pattern. The introduction is a challenge where adequacy is the only initial goal. Then, proficiency and practice, the latter begetting the former, but the pattern continuing, pacing, moving this hobby along from something new to something familiar. The problem is, once this new thing becomes familiar, I find the challenge of success less motivating, and I find that there must be something else I should try instead. I worry about this pattern in my life. I worry that the things I enjoy now will become the things I put away tomorrow.
But there is, in spite of all of these examples to the contrary, one thing that I continue to look forward to, that continues to delight. It’s a fire on an October night, with the sun lighting up the adjacent corn field and the trees beyond, the first few rolls of smoke from an oak fire. I will never get tired of that, no matter what else I move into and from. I’m careful to not light that fire too early, not on the first cool night of September, and not at the first cool night of October. The first fire is best left for a night that brings with it the chance of frost, because to start a fire too early in the fall is to cheapen it, to steal from it. So the fire is now lit, the ashes this morning smoldering, the first step outside so crisp, so still, with the smell of one of my favorite things still hanging in the air.